The Good Nurse's Manual.

While I was in hospital recently I talked to a couple of the nurses at length about the subject of their profession. Many angles were considered and discussed, but in the end I felt I had to come up with my own view of what the ‘proper’ role of a nurse should be. I’ve been considering it ever since and now I think I’ve found it, because for all the increasingly complex technology, the ever-burgeoning weight of rules, records and protocols, the tidal wave of medications flooding the houses of healing, and the inevitable constrictions consequent upon governmental underfunding – all of which are pushing the personal touch into the background – it’s actually quite simple.

When a person is in hospital suffering pain, anxiety, discomfort, fear and general debility, what they most need from a nurse is what they got, or at least had a right to expect, from their mothers when they were children.

I could write a lot of words around this, but I don’t think I need to. The childhood perception of the mother and the adult perception of the nurse are fundamentally the same, and so the first requirement of a good nurse is simply to care and never be out of earshot. Or so it seems to me.

Those who have been following the convoluted progress of my health issue since its inception in January might remember the young student nurse called Sabs who I wrote about back in April. I told of how impressed I was when she was going off shift at 7pm and addressed the gaggle of depleted old men with the words night, boys.

Boys, you see? She got it.